The American Military and the Evolution of Computer Technology From the Early 1940s to Early 1960s Essay

The history of computer technology goes back to the late 1930s – early 1940s, when the first computer was invented. American military used computer technology for different purposes, including strategic decisions and control functions. The technological change in information technology creates the possibility of change in the conduct of military operations. Computer technology constitutes a potentially powerful source in military affairs. The problems that military organizations have experienced in formulating appropriate responses to new technologies have traditionally been viewed as the result of a conservative and stability-seeking institution’s attempts to accommodate a phenomenon whose developmental trajectories are inherently difficult to predict. The age of experimental computers lasted into the fifties when all of the basic ideas and technological inventions became available to create the first generation of commercial general-purpose computers¹. During the 1940s-1960, the American military was the only ‘driver’ of computer development and innovations. “Though most of the research work took place at universities and in commercial firms, military research organizations such as the Office of Naval Research, the Communications Security Group (known by its code name OP-20-G), and the Air Comptroller’s Office paid for it. Military users became the proving ground for initial concepts and prototype machines”².

By the mid- 1930s, various developments had occurred, which made possible the realization of Babbage’s ideas (concerning computer technologies) without having to solve the mechanical problems which had defeated him.³. These were, in particular, the punch-card system just described and a variety of automatic selecting devices developed primarily for electrical communication systems. These possibilities were realized by Howard Aiken, of Harvard University, in 1937 and he invited International Business Machines to collaborate with him in their development. The result, in August 1944, was the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). This is commonly regarded as the prototype of modern electronic computers, and it is certainly true that it initiated an entirely new line of calculators and information processors. Nevertheless, it was not strictly an electronic computer, for it was based on electrically driven number wheels, controlled by an elaborate system of electro-magnetic clutches and programmed by punched tape. Although less ambitious than Babbage’s analytical engine, it was 50 ft long, weighed 5 tons, and included nearly a million components and 500 miles of wire⁴. Although it could multiply two eleven-digit numbers in three seconds, this was impossibly slow by the standards of only a few years later. Nevertheless, ASCC remained in use at Harvard for some fifteen years, and three later models were built in which, among other improvements, the magnetic clutches were replaced by electrical relays of the type used in communications engineering. These computers were not widely used by the military because their main functions were limited to “calculations, communication, and control”.⁵

The first of the true electronic computers was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), completed in 1946. It was designed and built for the US government by J. W. Mauchly and J. P. Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania. Originally called for to prepare ballistic tables for wartime use, it was in fact not completed until 1946 when it was sent to the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Maryland. Although input and output were still in the form of punched cards — which necessarily limited speed of operation — mechanical parts were eliminated except for switches to control certain sections of the circuitry used for special programming purposes⁶. The moving part was, in effect, a train of electrical impulses generated at the rate of 5000 per second and controlled by electronic gates. The demands of radar for pulsed signals had already generated much expertise in this field of electrical engineering. Leibniz’s stepped wheels or Ohdner’s pin-wheels were represented by groups of ten electronic valves. With ENIAC, two ten-digit numbers could be multiplied in little more than two-thousandths of a second.⁷

Computer engineers, notably J. von Neumann of the University of Pennsylvania, also went back to a proposal by Leibniz that mechanical calculation could be better performed by the use of a binary rather than a decimal system of notation. This simply means that numbers are built up from only two digits, 0 and 1, rather than ten as in common usage (0-9). Any number of digits can, of course, be used to express numbers; the ancient Japanese soroban, for example, operates on a quinary system⁸. The ideas of von Neumann were incorporated in a machine known as EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), work on which started at the University of Pennsylvania just before ENIAC was finished. It constructed a new form of the memory device based on the circulation of electrically generated sonic pulses through a long tube of mercury. Meanwhile, computer research was being undertaken in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, with emphasis on the development of storage capacity⁹.

During WWII, computer technology constitutes a potentially powerful source of change in military affairs, there exist obstacles to the optimal exploitation of this form of innovation. The problems that military organizations have experienced in formulating appropriate responses to new technologies have traditionally been viewed as the result of a conservative and stability-seeking institution’s attempts to accommodate a phenomenon whose developmental trajectories are inherently difficult to predict¹⁰. If the US Army’s historical relationship with the tank can provide any measure, this task can be rendered still more difficult by developments in the broader context within which organizational responses to technology-related change are forged. Even when an institution provides the tactical and operational environment within which the full potential of technological innovation might be realized, the overarching strategic and political environment can generate constraining influences of its own. More work remains to be done on this issue, but it is likely that many suboptimal responses to technology-related change were subjected to a broader set of structural constraints than is commonly realized.¹¹. “Computers thus improved military systems by “getting the man out of the loop” of critical tasks. Built directly into weapons systems, computers assisted or replaced human skill in aiming and operating advanced weapons, such as antiaircraft guns and missiles”¹².

The next stage of military power was connected with the development of the magnetic core storage system incorporated in the Remington-Rand UNIVAC (Model 1103A) in 1956. It is highly sophisticated but basically depends on the fact that magnetic rings are arranged at the intersection of a matrix of wires carrying electrical pulses. An electrical pulse in one wire is insufficient to reverse the direction of magnetization in the ring, but if two pulses arrive simultaneously, a reversal occurs¹³. This provided the input. The output was provided by the third set of wires passing through the rings and responding to changes in the direction of magnetization. By this time, computers were experiencing conditions comparable with those developing in the air transport business¹⁴. There, the higher speeds of aircraft made the journey itself quicker, but this was largely offset by delays caused by traffic congestion on the roads leading to and from airports; the need to register well in advance of take-off so that formalities could be completed; delay on arrival while luggage was unloaded and examined; and so on. In the computer field, the computing process itself had been enormously accelerated, but the continuing use of punched cards or tape for programming and output made it impossible greatly to speed up the process as a whole. The UNIVAC was important in that instead of paper tape, it made use of magnetic tape for programming; as we have noted earlier, this had been developed during the war in Germany and had subsequently been adopted for sound recording, especially in the motion picture industry. The original UNIVAC was designed for the US Census and delivered in 1951. In the following year, it was used to predict the outcome of the Presidential election, and its correct identification of Eisenhower as the successful candidate was important in directing public attention to the potentialities of computers. Up to this time, electronic computers had been based on thermionic valves; in the late 1950s, the replacement of these by transistors represented a major step forward. This takes us rather beyond 1950, but it is an appropriate point at which to close the history of computers nominally ending at mid-century. “Bell Laboratories, the largest independent electronics research laboratory in the country, saw the percentage of its peacetime budget allocated to military projects swell from zero (prewar) to upwards of 10 percent as it continued work on the Nike missile and other systems, many of them involving analog computers”¹⁵.

The real computer revolution had to wait until the end of World War II, when a much faster and more reliable solid-state device known as the transistor was invented. This was the age when American military and economic power was at its peak when high technology was strategic to America’s military efforts, and developers and manufacturers could be guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars for participating in such ventures as the ICBM Minuteman program, the Apollo lunar mission, and the Vietnam War¹⁶. According to Michael Borrus and John Sysman of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, for a time in the fifties, about one-half of the research budgets of IBM and AT&T were paid for by defense contracts, and from 1962 to 1965, military and space procurement for integrated circuits accounted for more than 75 percent of total industry sales. It was this cultural and institutional setting in combination that enabled America to gain a leadership role in high technology and maintain it over the decades until the late eighties when other countries, especially Japan, would begin to seriously challenge this leadership in key segments of the industry¹⁷.

The communications satellite was another computer innovation that gave tremendous opportunities and potential to the army after WWII. Along with the transistor, the microprocessor, the laser, and the optical fiber, the communications satellite must rate as one of the most important technological developments in the postwar period. Because it can carry telephone and television signals as well as information and news, and because a single satellite can cover an entire hemisphere, it had dramatic military as well as economic, industrial, cultural, and political implications. The satellite communications revolution began with the launching of Sputnik I by the Soviet Union in 1957, and it launched both the United States and the Soviet Union into a race to exploit space and space technology for military as well as commercial purposes¹⁸. In July 1958, the U.S. Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act establishing NASA as a civilian agency to lead America’s space development activities. But it was the leadership of the United States in microelectronics and computer technology that proved critical to eventually surpassing the Soviet Union in the development of satellite technology and led to its landing a man on the moon in 1969. In the late fifties, the United States tested several scientific communications satellites, including Explorer I, launched in 1958, and various military satellites as well as passive communications satellites, including ECHO I and ECHO 11, which simply reflected radio signals. Those that followed were active in the sense that they had electronics onboard to amplify signals¹⁹.

A number of developments in the history of computer-mediated com­munication were fundamental to the success of the ARPANET project. The first was the idea of communicating with computers at a distance. In September 1940, George Stibitz had decided to demonstrate a calculator to a meeting of the American Mathematical Society. The complex machine took up lots of space, so rather than transporting it to the meeting with the risk of it getting damaged, Stibitz set up a teletype terminal so that the calculator could be used remotely via a telegraph connection. A second development was that computers had to be seen as more than just devices for solving mathematical problems²⁰. In 1945, Vannevar Bush published an article, ‘As we may think, in which he described the ‘Memex,’ a communication system for storing and retrieving information. A third and crucial development for setting up the ARPANET was the invention of packet-switching communication technology. Packet-switching involves the breaking down of digitized information into packets or blocks that are labeled to indicate both their origin and their destina­tion, and the sending of these from one computer to another. The advant­ages of packet-switching are twofold. First, network resources are used more efficiently because a single channel can carry more than one transmission simultaneously.²¹.

After WWII, the technology necessary for packet-switching was developed inde­pendently at a number of research centers around the world, for example, at the National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain and the Massachu­setts Institute of Technology and the RAND Corporation in the United States. Of these, the research done by Paul Baran at the RAND Cor­poration deserves particular attention. Baran had been commissioned by the United States Air Force to do a study on how the military could maintain control over its missiles and bombers in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. In 1964 he proposed a communication network with no central command or control point²². In the event of an attack on anyone point, all surviving points would be able to re-establish contact with each other.⁶ He called this kind of network a distributed network. It was from this RAND Corporation study that the false rumor started that the ARPANET was somehow directly and primarily related to the building of a communication network that would be resistant to nuclear attack.

Computing facilities especially represented particularly delicate operational environments, characterized by large workforces. In an era when air conditioning was still comparatively rare, computer centers were generally arctic-like environments. Communications networks likewise consisted of extremely dense hardwired arrangements linked to fixed location detector sites for battle-space management. Space-based detectors made the initial contact, but the existing BMD technology was a terminal point or limited area defensive arrangement, which meant the detectors handling the actual interception must be placed comparatively close at hand for ease and speed of operation²³. The vulnerability of these facilities to destruction or electronic disruption was a particularly thorny problem but was not in itself disabling since larger policy questions drove the debate. Firing missiles over population centers is not considered a prudent thing to do since flight failures do occur even under the best of circumstances. Therefore, missiles are transported to Vandenberg Air Force Base for testing, a process during which the missile moves completely outside its operational milieu with new parts substituted for existing computer hardware in order to run the test. How reliable or accurate an evaluation this process is best, in fact, proved troubling to many, but no realistic alternative has ever been developed.

In sum, computer technologies played a crucial role in the development of military forces during WWII. Concepts such as the stored program control, binary representation of data and programs, and the use of punched cards were becoming standard only in the fifties. In a short period of time, electromechanical and fully electronic and magnetic storage technologies were also becoming commercially available. The triode became a natural means of fast switching in the central processing unit. It was a significant improvement over electromechanical relays in terms of speed and reliability, and it reduced the switching time from seconds to milliseconds. Further, the heart of the American strategic nuclear forces rested upon a series of assumptions that the systems would work when needed. Given the high failure rate of military equipment during routine operations, this remains an interesting assumption.

Footnotes

1. Campbell-Kelly, M., Aspray, W. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. (HarperCollins Publishers, 1997): 25.
2. Why Build Computers? The Military Role in Computer Research. N.d. 2007.
3. Campbell-Kelly, M., Aspray, W. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. (HarperCollins Publishers, 1997): 29-30.
4. Geoffrey J. E. Rawlins, Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996, p.67
5. Why Build Computers? The Military Role in Computer Research. N.d. 2007.
6. Geoffrey J. E. Rawlins, Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology Cambridge: (MIT Press, 1996): 38.
7. Ibid, 39.
8. Campbell-Kelly, M., Aspray, W. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. (HarperCollins Publishers, 1997): 1.
9. Ibid, 1.
10. Geoffrey J. E. Rawlins, Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996): 120.
11. Walker, G.K., Information Warfare, and Neutrality. Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 33 (2000): 1079.
12. Why Build Computers? The Military Role in Computer Research. N.d. 2007.
13. Campbell-Kelly, M., Aspray, W. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. (HarperCollins Publishers, 1997): 87.
14. Ibid, 88.
15. Why Build Computers? The Military Role in Computer Research. N.d. 2007.
16. Ceruzzi, P.E. A History of Modern Computing, 2nd Edition. (MIT Press, 1998): 65.
17. Ibid, 66
18. Campbell-Kelly, M., Aspray, W. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. (HarperCollins Publishers, 1997): 299.
19. Ibid, 288.
20. Ibid, 300
21. Ibid, 300
22. Pearson, A.W. Allied Military Model Making during World War II. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 29 (2002): 227.
23. Campbell-Kelly, M., Aspray, W. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. (HarperCollins Publishers, 1997): 305.